The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Information retrieval typically requires a user to have a minimum level of skill with a particular query language. Furthermore, in order to properly construct a query, the user must often know how stored data is structured. For example, a user who wishes to retrieve information from a Structured Query Language (SQL) database may need to be familiar with both SQL and the database schema.
Although user interfaces may be used to push some of the requisite skill for users to programmers, the user interfaces may be limited in the complexity and efficiency of the queries they can be used to generate. For example, web interfaces that employ drop-down menus can be used to specify a limited number of predetermined query parameters. Furthermore, the predetermined query parameters may be used to construct a query that is executed in an inefficient order.